he diachrony of negation
Introduction
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti
he University of Manchester / University of Genoa. A resilient subject
Despite intensive research, negation remains elusive in many ways. Its expression across languages, its underlying cognitive mechanisms, its development across time, and related phenomena, such as negative polarity and negative concord, leave many unresolved issues of both a deinitional and a substantive nature. he importance of works on negation for recent developments of linguistic theory is relected in an ever increasing interest in the topic. As well as monographs and collections addressing negation from a synchronic point of view, such as Horn (2010), Penka (2011), and de Swart (2010), the last few years have seen the publi-cation of a number of volumes focussing on the diachrony of negation from dif-ferent theoretical angles, viz. Jäger (2008), Larrivée & Ingham (2011), Roberts & Roussou (2003), and Willis et al. (2013). In addition, this brief list leaves out a signiicant number of workshops and lone-standing papers published in journals and edited volumes with broader overarching topics, such as van Gelderen (2009) on linguistic cycles as an important model of language change, an idea further explored in van Gelderen (2011).
he idea of a cycle, and in particular the so-called Jespersen Cycle, is in various ways central to much current work on the diachrony of negation, incl. the studies mentioned above and several of the chapters in the present vol-ume. he Jespersen Cycle (or “Jespersen’s Cycle”, cf. Dahl 1979: 88) is short-hand for the well-known phenomenon that, across a number of languages, the historical evolution of standard clause negation1 seems to proceed in a cyclical
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Jacqueline Visconti
fashion, along largely similar lines. Jespersen (1917: 4) described this evolution as follows:
he original negative adverb is irst weakened, then found insuicient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as a negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word.
French, which is the object of the contributions in chs. 7–9 of this volume, is oten adduced as an illustration, as in Table 1 below:2
Table 1. he evolution of French clause negation (sample sentence: ‘I do not say…’)
Stage 0. [Classical Latin] non dico he negator is preverbal
Stage 1. je ne dis he preverbal negator is phonetically reduced Stage 2. je ne dis (pas) he preverbal negator is optionally
complemented by a postverbal element Stage 3. je ne dis pas he postverbal element grammaticalizes as part
of a discontinuous negator embracing the verb Stage 4. je (ne) dis pas he original preverbal negator becomes
optional
Stage 5. [Future French?] je dis pas he negator is postverbal Stage 6. [Louisiana
French Creole]
mo pa di he previously postverbal negator migrates to preverbal position
Predictably, Jespersen’s original formulation has been subject to criticism. For one thing, it suggests that the cycle is driven principally by phonetic change, i.e.
he diachrony of negation
the “weakening” of the original, preverbal, negative marker. Against this hypoth-esis, Kiparsky and Condoravdi (2006: 4) observe that cross-linguistic evidence for it is not strong, and indeed, other scholars, starting with Meillet (1912: 140), have suggested that the addition of a new postverbal marker may more plausibly be triggered by pragmatic factors.
Secondly, typological studies have suggested that there is not just one, but sev-eral, Jespersen Cycles (van der Auwera 2009), as languages may add not just one, but two, and occasionally even three postverbal markers. In other words, rather than Stage 4 being the logical next step ater Stage 3, alternative developments are possible.
hirdly, a related, but broader, typological question concerns the degree to which European languages, where the Jespersen Cycle has so far been most amply attested, are representative of the languages of the world in respect of the evolution of negative marking. he answer to this latter question is of importance not least to the issue of reconstruction, for while the Jespersen Cycle appears in principle to be an eminently useful basis for reconstruction of earlier stages of languages with few or no textual records of any signiicant time-depth, it is not clear that it is cur-rently suiciently understood and suiciently well-attested throughout the world to serve this purpose.
Fourthly, even those languages where the empirical reality of the basic pat-tern posited by Jespersen has never been in doubt show substantial variation in the speed with which they progress through the cycle, and the degree to which its diferent stages are clearly delimited in time. hus, languages may remain stable at a given stage of the Cycle (oten Stage 3, where negative marking is bipartite and embraces the verb) for very long periods of time. In addition, languages may not just go through stages of simple variation such as Stages 2 and 4, where bipartite negation alternates with either pre- or postverbal negation, but stages of complex variation may also be instantiated, where preverbal, embracing, and postverbal negation are found simultaneously. Because, as mentioned above, the typologi-cal representativity of the Jespersen Cycle has yet to be irmly established, such languages raise the issue of whether the evolution of negation is unidirectional or whether it might be possible for postverbal negative markers in embracing con-structions to be lost.
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in-depth investigation of the evolution of negation in individual languages that have not frequently been studied from this point of view. Among other things, these chapters query the commonly held belief that the Jespersen’s cycle may be less frequent outside of Europe (cf. e.g. Willis et al. 2013: 11). Chapter 3, for instance, shows that there is enough evidence in 409 Austronesian languages to conclude that the Jespersen cycle is attested there too, and sometimes even taken further to triple, or even quadruple negation constructions.
he wide typological variety of the data highlights, moreover, the impor-tance of word-order issues (preverbal vs postverbal markers), as discussed in Chapters 3, 5 and 6. Whereas word order realignment processes operated by the Jespersen Cycle via the shit from preverbal to postverbal negation were origi-nally central in works such as Vennemann (1974) or Harris (1978), as pointed out by Willis et al. (2013: 10), such word order issues have become less prominent in recent studies (although see van Gelderen 2011: Chapter 8 for some perti-nent observations), which are rather focused on the alternating weakening and strengthening of negative markers and on the phonological and pragmatic factors at stake. Data from Austronesian, Taiwanese Southern Min and Berber shit the focus back to word order issues and to their role in determining to what extent cases of bipartite negation in those languages are compatible with a Jespersen Cycle scenario. As discussed in Chapter 3, Jespersen’s NEG-FIRST principle, which says that a negative marker tends to come early in the sentence and that it is very oten preverbal (see also Horn 1989: 293; Dryer 1998), holds for Austro-nesian also. Since many second negators have a non-negative origin and since the irst negator will tend to occupy an early position in the clause, it is expected that many second negators will follow the irst negators. hus, the combination of the Jespersen cycle with the NEG-FIRST principle gives the prediction that one nega-tive marker precedes the verb and the other follows it, at least in languages that do not put their verb very late in the sentence. Since this expectation is largely borne out, it allows for the speculation that the preverbal marker is the oldest one in the language considered.
he diachrony of negation
bipartite clausal negation nor for preverbal negation. Moreover, against frequent claims in the literature, the survey reveals that the strategy of expressing clausal negation only through inherently negative pronouns or adverbs is not only found in Europe, but also in the Americas, and that it is also found in verb-initial languages.
Quantiier negation raises the further issue of the possible existence of a Quan-tiier Cycle (Ladusaw 1992) bearing some resemblance, and possibly related, to the Jespersen Cycle. Such a cycle, if real, and its parallelisms with the Jespersen Cycle, could be illustrated as in Table 2 below, again using French as the test language.
Table 2. A possible Quantiier Cycle
Stage 1. Je ne dis (rien) ‘I do not say (a thing)’
A polarity-neutral NP optionally accompanies the preverbal negative marker to make the scope of the negation explicit
Stage 2. Je ne dis rien ‘I don’t say anything’
Preverbal negation + Negative Polarity Item
Stage 3. Je (ne) dis rien ‘I don’t say anything/I say nothing’
N-word optionally accompanied by a preverbal negative agreement marker (Stage 4.
[Future French?]
Je dis rien ‘I say nothing’ Negative quantiier)
here are two central questions here: he irst is whether system-level (or “macro-parametric”) change is involved, such that the development of all quanti-iers used in negative or negative-polarity environments in a given language is triggered in the same way and follows largely identical diachronic trajectories, or whether their evolution may be determined more by individual, more or less idio-syncratic, (or “micro-parametric”, cf. Déprez 2011) factors pertaining, for instance, to their source meaning or the particular part of speech from which they originate, than by the existence of a Quantiier Cycle as such.
he second question is whether the diachronic development from polarity neutral item > NPI > n-word3/negative indeinite, which in and of itself is uncon-troversially attested in many cases, is (at least partly) unidirectional or whether indeinites are rather subject to what Jäger (2010) calls a “random walk”, such that items may move freely back and forth between polarity types and/or between
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NPI-status and n-word/negative-indeinite status. A crucial issue in that context is how to reliably distinguish between the four types of indeinite in any given language at any given stage.
Two of the chapters (Chapters 7–8) in the second part of the volume, which centers on French, a language whose early stages are comparatively richly docu-mented, and which therefore provides an important test case for hypotheses about the diachrony of negative marking, are concerned to elucidate the history of spe-ciic quantiiers in that language. In both cases, the data adduced weakens the idea of a general Quantiier Cycle in French, emphasizing the importance of heteroge-neous developments that cannot easily be reduced to the operation of a few simple principles, hence of individual pathways over a systemic approach.
A inal chapter on French highlights the importance of taking sociolinguistic factors into consideration, such as the inluence of normative pressures, to account for language variation and change mechanisms. As noted by Hansen (2011: 282), it is important, in developing models of the evolution of negative markers, that we be careful not to idealize the database:
here is ample evidence, across this and other areas of the grammar, that language users can live happily with structural and distributional variation and, indeed, ambiguities for very considerable lengths of time. In a language like French, we should probably expect such variation and ambiguities to be all the more evident due to the tension between, on the one hand, a culturally strong tradition of codiication and prescriptivism with respect to the more formal, in particular written, registers, and, on the other hand, the inevitable evolution of informal, in particular spoken, registers.
In sum, our volume shows the importance both of large-scale typological stud-ies and of ine-grained studstud-ies of individual negative markers, their diferent dia-chronic sources and trajectories, as well as diferences in the pace of change.
. A note on terminology
he diachrony of negation
One peculiarity worth mentioning, however, is the use of the term “double (clausal) negation” in Chapters 2 and 3 to refer to what others term bipartite, or embracing, negation (e.g. French Je ne le vois pas “I don’t see it”). It is worth not-ing that the term “double negation”, besides referrnot-ing to the use of two negation morphemes to express one semantic negation, as in the chapters mentioned and, for instance, WALS (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013), is frequently used elsewhere used to designate the relation of mutual cancelation between two negation morphemes resulting in a positive sentence (e.g. Zeijlstra 2004: 58–50; 261–263). Double nega-tion in this latter sense is opposed to “negative concord”, i.e. the phenomenon where two (or multiple) negatives appear without canceling each other out. Nega-tive concord is known, alternaNega-tively, as“multiple negation”, “negaNega-tive doubling” or “negative spread”.
. Summaries of the individual chapters
he irst two chapters of the volume take a broad typological perspective on the expression and evolution of negation, focusing on a range of non-European languages.
In Chapter 2, “On the relation between double clausal negation and nega-tive concord”, Lauren Van Alsenoy and Johan van der Auwera study the relation between double clausal negation (as exempliied by French ne … pas ‘not’) and negative concord (as exempliied by French ne … personne ‘nobody/not…any-body’). Using a database of 179 languages from Asia, Africa and the Americas, the authors test the proposals by Zeijlstra (2004) and de Swart (2010) that nega-tive concord may be a necessary condition for double clausal negation, and they conclude that although French shows that the two phenomena can be related, they coincide only rarely. he subsequent discussion focuses on Ewe and Karok, lan-guages in which the two phenomena interact, but in a non-French way, and on seven languages with negative concord, but no double negation, thus sketching a battery of parameters of variation.
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he following chapters take a closer look at aspects of the evolution of nega-tion in three less-studied, also non-European, languages.
In Chapter 4, “he development of Standard Negation in Quechua”, Edith Pineda-Bernuy shows that, across the several languages and varieties of this lan-guage family, three diferent patterns of standard negation can be discerned: sin-gle, preverbal negation with mana, bipartite, embracing negation with mana(-m)
… -chu and single, postverbal negation with -chu. hese three patterns exist along-side a large and varied number of non-standard patterns, all of which are carefully described. he author subsequently discusses three possible paths of development, arguing that the most plausible one takes the form of a three-stage evolution:
mana > mana… -chu > -chu. While this appears compatible with the deinition of Jespersen’s Cycle, Pineda-Bernuy emphasizes that phonetic erosion of mana is not a factor.
Chapter 5, “Taiwanese Southern Min V2 negation: a historical perspective”, by Hui-Ling Yang, provides a historical account of some issues which have not previously been fully addressed in connection with the Taiwanese Southern Min V bo XP construction. One issue is an ambiguity over two interpretations, while another involves the presence or absence of post-verbal negation. Assum-ing that the diachrony of bo is parallel to that of Mandarin mei, and using inner aspect as her theoretical framework, Yang analyzes Southern Min negative bo
as originating in the V and as having been reanalyzed as an aspect marker in V bo XP. Other than the diachrony of Chinese negation, previous treatments of one particular type of V2 negation are also reviewed. Contra Huang (2009), who analyzes the semantics of bo in V bo DP as lexically determined by the abstractness of the nominal phrase following bo, Chapter 5 argues that bo in this construction can occupy two positions: while the aspectual head bo yields an episodic interpretation in the nominal argument, bo in a higher head gives rise to genericity.
he diachrony of negation
he three inal chapters provide new perspectives on the evolution of negative expressions in French, one of the most widely studied of languages in this respect, further demonstrating the richness and complexity of the diachronic development of negation.
In Chapter 7, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen explores “he grammaticaliza-tion of negative indeinites: the case of the temporal/aspectual n-words plus and
mais in Medieval French”. he author argues that while the contemporary French n-words have undergone a process of paradigmaticization, in the sense that the language has evolved from making available a relatively open set of quantifying expressions, many of which could be used independently of polarity, to ofering speakers a small closed set of items, which are syntactically conined to contexts of negative polarity, individual members of this functional paradigm appear to have followed diferent paths of evolution. hus, while the evolution of standard clause negation in French is well-established as an instantiation of Jespersen’s Cycle, there is no parallel unidirectional macro-development of quantifying negators, i.e. no Quantiier Cycle, in that language. he paper is concluded by a discussion of the status of functional paradigms and the role of paradigmatic pressure as a factor in language change.
Further contributing to the elucidation of how indeinites evolve, Richard Ingham and Amel Kallel adduce “Evidence from a correspondence corpus for dia-chronic change in French indeinites 1450–1715” in Chapter 8. Data from personal letters is interpreted using Haspelmath’s 1997 semantic map of indeinites, and it is shown that the re-categorisation of quelque (‘some’) as an ordinary positive indeinite is associated with a major change in the use of the hitherto all-purpose indeinite aucun (‘some’ > ‘any’/’no(ne)’), leading the latter to become an n-item in Modern French. Like Hansen’s paper, Ingham & Kallel’s analysis contributes to an account of the evolution of syntactic negation that emphasizes micro-parametric factors involving the properties of individual lexical items, rather than a macro-parametric change afecting the structural representation of negation.
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in France French and in the presumed lesser impact of normative pressures in Quebec. he author concludes that his data provide support for the notion that stability characterizes vernacular varieties.
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